BACKGROUND Street-scale urban design policies are recommended to increase physical activity in communities. Our purpose was to examine U.S. public support for local street-scale urban design features and policies. METHODS Analysis is based on a cross-sectional national sample of adults (n = 4682) participating in the 2006 HealthStyles mail survey. RESULTS About 57% of adults rated local str...

Background: In China, rapid urbanization has caused migration from rural to urban areas, and raised the prevalence of hypertension. However, public health insurance is not portable from one place to another, and migration may limit the effectiveness of this non-portable health insurance on healthcare. Our study aims to investigate whether migration limits the effectiveness of health insurance o...

This chapter describes how the spatial distribution of economic activity changes as economies develop and grow. We start with the relation between development and rural-urban migration. Moving beyond the coarse rural-urban distinction, we then focus on the continuum of locations in an economy and describe how the patterns of convergence and divergence change with development. As we discuss, the...

Design is a social phenomenon and researchers suggest that social interaction, negotiations and communication between designers are essential to initiate creativity. Within the design studio environment, a number of factors affect the healthy social interaction and design negotiations, such as the teaching style of tutors and the culture that governs a design studio’s environment. This may in t...

This paper presents a new method for the conversion of one style of dependency treebanks into another, using contextual, Constraint Grammar-based transformation rules for both structural changes (attachment) and changes in syntacticfunctional tags (edge labels). In particular, we address the conversion of traditional syntactic dependency annotation into the semantically motivated dependency ann...

One of the land development problems of developing countries is to provide readily available land for new urbanization demands. Compensation based procedures are mostly used land provision methods around the world in urban land development applications but it is both expensive and mandatory. To provide new settlements and built-up areas, there should be a more effective land redistribution proc...

To analyze the correlation between asbestos lung burden and lung cancer, lungs of 211 female cases with and without lung cancer were examined. Phase-contrast microscopic (PCM) counting of ferruginous (FBs) and uncoated fibers (UFs), which had length longer than 5 microns and aspect ratios greater than 3:1, revealed a significantly higher level of FBs plus UFs in urban lung cancer cases than urb...

BACKGROUND Manifest socio-economic differences are a trigger for internal migration in many sub-Saharan settings including Kenya. An interplay of the social, political and economic factors often lead to internal migration. Internal migration potentially has significant consequences on an individual's economic growth and on access to health services, however, there has been little research on th...

Urban areas are increasing globally, providing opportunities for biodiversity researchers to study the process in which species become established in novel, highly disturbed habitats. This ecological process can be understood through analyses of morphological and genetic variation, which can shed light on patterns of neutral and adaptive evolution. Previous studies have shown that urban populat...

Reconciling human and non-human use of urban regions to support biological conservation represents a major challenge for the 21st century. The concept of reconciliation ecology, by which the anthropogenic environment may be modified to encourage non-human use and biodiversity preservation without compromising societal utilization, potentially represents an appropriate paradigm for urban conserv...